Is the Kimye Wedding Photo Great Art?

The Instagram picture that captures our time

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Kanye West could have spent four days having sex with Kim Kardashian. Instead he chose to pass that time during their honeymoon working on this photograph, which was posted on her Instagram.

While spending your honeymoon perfecting a wedding picture might, in other people, be taken as a sign of obsessive-compulsive disorder or the late stages of a narcissism spiral, with Kimye it's par for the course. "I can't be with any girl but Kim," Kanye declared at a panel shortly after the image went up, "because that's the girl whose pictures I look at the most and get turned on by." Quickly the image surpassed a posting on Justin Bieber's account to become the single most liked image in the history of Instagram, which makes it a candidate for the most popular image in the history of the Internet, which, in turn, makes it a candidate for the most popular image ever. Currently, it stands at 2.32 million likes. But its popularity, its omnipresence, is old hat. Kanye, whom serious people have called the Mozart of our time, always aspires to grandeur — it's his saving grace — and his work deserves to be asked grand questions. So let's ask: Is Kimye's wedding photography a great work of art?

Kanye himself certainly thinks so. He spent so much time on the image in a competitive pique after Annie Leibovitz did not shoot the wedding. His own remarks on this creative endeavor were cryptic, by which I mean I don't understand them. "Can you imagine telling someone who wants to just Instagram a photo, who's the No. 1 person on Instagram, 'We need to work on the color of the flower wall,' or the idea that it's a Givenchy dress, and it's not about the name Givenchy, it's about the talent that is Riccardo Tisci — and how important Kim is to the Internet." He also made the just plain bizarre statement that Annie Leibovitz was "afraid of celebrity" to explain why she dropped out. Annie Leibovitz is afraid of celebrities the way Siegfried and Roy were afraid of tigers.

Nonetheless, the Leibovitz comments are helpful. She is clearly Kanye's main influence here. And yet the image is in so many ways the opposite of Leibovitz. In Leibovitz's great celebrity photographs, the power of the celebrity's personality burns off the page. The famous man or woman explodes out of the landscape. The great Leibovitz images make you think, "Aha, that is why she's so famous." Kim and Kanye, by contrast, are folded into each other in their wedding picture. Their kiss obscures their faces. Unless you already know who they are, you could easily mistake them for just another couple rapidly approaching middle age. The size of Kardashian's backside is clear enough, but otherwise no sense of their identities emerges from the image.

Though inspired by Annie Leibovitz, Kanye's photo is in many ways the opposite of her work.

As strange as it may sound, the defining feature of Kimye's wedding photograph is its restraint. The couple here, rather than being thrust forward, is being pulled away from us. The wall of white flowers, and the crack of light behind them, enfolds them like a closing, rather than an opening, clamshell. The chemistry of the kiss itself is impossible to determine, since it is a wedding kiss, the original public sexual display. There is no way to tell if their desire is real (as in they are really attracted to each other) or fake (as in they are doing it for the cameras) because this particular moment in a couple's life — the kiss at the end of a wedding ceremony — is always a fake moment. When the viewer knows the couple is Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, the fantasy is that, for a moment, just for a moment, they may have stopped thinking about the cameras. But that's also true at other weddings.

Obviously, the image is inseparable from two aspects of its creation that are unrelated to the mere pixels on the screen: the story of their celebrity and the number of likes. The quantification of the latter is an essential, rather than an accidental, feature of the artwork. "The fact that the No. 1 most liked photo has a kind of aesthetic was a win for what the mission is, which is raising the palette," Kanye said. Again, his rambling incoherence is confusing, but it shouldn't distract from the basic idea he is trying to communicate, which is interesting and even important. He knows things on the Internet tend to be crap. He hopes to raise the quality. What he is saying is actually quite radical. Internet art is polished turd. Therefore let's all start polishing as hard as we can. He spent four days during his honeymoon polishing. And he triumphed in the end. Kimye's wedding photograph is, quite simply, the perfect Instagram photograph. You can tell that from the number of likes.

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies.

Just so: Kimye's photograph has put its decadent finger on profound "historical energies." It's not so much a creative product as it is a historical one. Which is why it can simultaneously be a great image without being an even mildly good one. It has no truth. It is only a little pretty. But it is a machine for making strangers click a button that says "like." And that makes it absolutely perfectly of its time, an achievement that almost might be worth four days away from your honeymoon.